


A Summer Wasting

by Mireille



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-10-06
Updated: 2005-10-06
Packaged: 2019-03-11 16:06:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13527801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: Lydia had never found the ordinary to be interesting at all.





	A Summer Wasting

**Author's Note:**

> (Lydia, in case no one remembers her, is the Spike-groupie Watcher from "Checkpoint." The things I do for ficathons...)

Lydia can hardly remember the face of the boy who gave her her first kiss. 

She remembers that it was summer, and that she'd just turned sixteen. Father had been in the Amazon that year; Lydia had spent the spring writing long, eloquent letters begging him to let her join him when the term ended, but he'd told her he thought she'd be happier at home. He'd been wrong, of course; how could she be happier at home with Mother, being encouraged to "enjoy herself," than she would be working with him? 

Keeping her in England had probably been her mother's idea in the first place. She had some sort of idea that Lydia needed to spend her holidays reading less and socializing more. And so, while she hadn't been forbidden to read any of the books in her father's library, except the few Father himself had told her to leave alone, her mother gave her a disapproving frown whenever she caught Lydia with a book. Even her argument that she had a list of texts she was _expected_ to read before the next term started was met with a shake of her mother's head. 

"You should be out having a little fun," she would say. "You'll only be young once, and one day, you'll look back and regret this."

Now, Lydia can wonder what it was that her mother looked back and regretted, but at the time, she hadn't cared. She'd only slammed her book shut, pushing her glasses up on her nose--she'd been offered contact lenses as her birthday present, but she'd refused, saying she hadn't wanted to be bothered with them--and scowling up at her mother. She'd known what was coming when her mother got like this. 

It didn't matter that Lydia could name off _several_ friends from the Academy--all of whom were off doing exciting things for the summer, she was certain, while she was stuck rotting here--or that she didn't want to spend time with people she couldn't talk to about the things she found _really_ interesting. If she told most people about the essay she'd written on the Order of Aurelius--the one Harbourne had given her ten out of ten on, and he never gave higher than nine--they'd think she could be locked up somewhere. 

She'd already felt as though she'd been locked up somewhere, as though the entire summer were some sort of punishment. But she'd only been sixteen, and she'd known Father wouldn't be happy to hear that she'd been arguing with her mother, so she'd gone out with the "friends" her mother had found for her, friends who didn't seem any happier with the arrangement than she did. Perhaps, if she played along, next year she could help her father with his research. 

Mother had tried, certainly. She hadn't thrown Lydia in with strangers--they were children of one of Mother's school friends. Daniel was doing brilliantly at school, or so his mother had told hers, and his sister Miriam would be at Oxford in the autumn--she had, at least, found people Lydia couldn't feel _too_ much more intelligent than. But they were dull. They didn't understand anything real. They didn't know about magic, or demons, or vampires, or Slayers. They didn't know _anything_ , and Lydia couldn't tell them. 

So she went around with them whenever she couldn't get out of it, and met their friends, and went to their parties. Whenever anyone talked about school, she mentioned French and Latin and maths, and never said a word about coming top of her year in Vampire Lore and Legends. She knew they thought she was boring, but she didn't care; they were too ignorant to matter. 

One night, Daniel had kissed her: wet and sloppy and open-mouthed, and Lydia had found herself vaguely wondering why everyone made such a big fuss about it. She'd thought she was supposed to feel _something_ other than a little annoyed that he was bothering her: he was rather good-looking, she supposed, and nice enough, but she just wasn't interested. It wasn't that she didn't like boys; it was just that Daniel was far too ordinary, and Lydia had never found the ordinary to be very interesting at all. 

Then he'd tried to put his hand under her shirt, and that gave her the excuse she needed to slap him, and go home, to cross another day of exile off on her calendar. 

After that, Daniel didn't come round any more, and neither did Miriam--Lydia didn't know what Daniel had told her, and she didn't care--and so Lydia was free to spend her days in her father's library. She curled up in his big leather armchair with one of his copies of the Watcher diaries, and consoled herself by thinking that soon she'd be able to return to the Academy, to prepare herself for a world that might be dangerous, but was far from ordinary. 

She doesn't remember what Daniel looked like, or the sound of his voice--it's been too long, and he was too unimportant, in the grand scheme of things--but she can still recall every word that long-dead Watcher wrote.

**Author's Note:**

> [me on tumblr](https://mireille719.tumblr.com)


End file.
